Augustus lives
by Gaspard Connington
Summary: As the title says, I'm always annoyed at characters being killed so I decided to make up an impossible ending.


**Disclaimer: I rewrote the full book for my personal use because Augustus and Hazel were way too pretentious for my taste ( I don't mean it as in ''they were too smart to be teenagers'' as some people tend to complain, they seemed pretty average to me, like real teens), I resumed it to publish it here since I mostly just edited some pretentious or annoying phrases by them so it's like 90% the same words as the original book, it starts at chapter 21 because this is where Augustus dies and the point of this Fanfiction is Augustus living at the end of the book. I know the ending I wrote is PRETTY STUPID -you'll see what I mean- but I just wanted to share it, this is my first Fanfiction and my first language is Spanish, I'm saying this because there's probably some grammar errors. Also, I didn't want them to get together until the end, it annoys me when people get together too soon (80% of books and TV series), so that's another reason for me changing the book. If anyone is interested in the full edited book I have it in Microsoft Word. Or you can start reading at chapter 26 and it will still make sense. **

**CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE**

**A**ugustus Waters suddenly disappeared. He was with his mom and dad and sisters. His mom called me at three thirty in the morning. I'd known, of course, that he was dying. I'd talked to his dad before going to bed, and he told me, "It could be tonight," but still, when I grabbed the phone from the bedside table and saw Gus's Mom on the caller ID, everything inside of me collapsed. She was just crying on the other end of the line, and she told me Augustus was missing, and that shocked me, she was expecting me to know where he was, but I had no idea, I was not prepared for this.

My parents came in then, looking expectant, and I told them what happened.

I called Isaac, who cursed life and the universe and God Himself and who said where are the goddamned trophies to break when you need them, and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters was Augustus Waters.

My parents stayed in my room forever until it was morning and finally Dad said, "Do you want to be alone?" and I nodded and Mom said,

"We'll be right outside the door," me thinking, I don't doubt it. It was unbearable. The whole thing. Every second worse than the last. We had called him, of course, but he wouldn't answer, I just kept thinking about calling him again, wondering what would happen, if anyone would answer. In the last weeks, we'd been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing: The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your corememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before just because I didn't know where he was. What was he thinking?

When you go into the ER, one of the first things they ask you to do is to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and from there they decide which drugs to use and how quickly to use them, A nurse asked me about the pain, and I couldn't even speak, so I held up nine fingers. Later, after they'd given me something, the nurse came in and she was kind of stroking my hand while she took my blood pressure and she said, "You know how I know you're a fighter? You called a ten a nine." But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.

"You've reached the voice mail of Augustus Waters," he said, the clarion voice I'd fallen for. "Leave a message." It beeped. The dead air on the line was so eerie. I just wanted to go back to that secret post-terrestrial third space with him that we visited when we talked on the phone. I waited for that feeling, but it never came: The dead air on the line was no comfort, and finally I hung up. Was he even alive?

His parents called around noon to say they still didn't know where he was.

After a while, I went out into the living room to sit with my parents and watch TV. I couldn't tell you what the show was, but at some point, my mom said, "Hazel, what can we do for you?"

And I just shook my head. I started crying again.

"What can we do?" Mom asked again.

I shrugged, there was nothing that could have made me feel better, I didn't know where he was, and since his condition was so severe he was as good as dead anyway, he was probably going to be found lifeless somewhere soon, this was just like when he tried to buy white chocolate by himself at night. But everything was so awful, when the police tried to track his cellphone it was inside of a trashcan, he wanted to hide, I just didn't understand.

But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until finally I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.

**CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO**

**A **year since Augustus went missing already. Taking into account the state that he was in when he disappeared his parents decided to held a funeral, I don't blame them, regardless of the police being unable to find his body, what where the chances of him being alive by now? When we first got there, I sat in the back of the visitation room, a little room of exposed stone walls off to the side of the sanctuary in the Literal Heart of Jesus church. There were maybe eighty chairs set up in the room, and it was two-thirds full but felt one-third empty.

For a while, I just watched people walk up to the coffin, which was on some kind of cart covered in a purple tablecloth. All these people I'd never seen before would kneel down next to it or stand over it for a while, maybe crying, maybe saying something, and then all of them would touch the coffin, he wasn't there but I guess it made sense.

Peter Van Houten wore a white linen suit, tailored to account for his rotundity, a powder-blue dress shirt, and a green tie. He looked like he was dressed for a colonial occupation of Panama, not a funeral. The minister said, "Let us pray," but as everyone else bowed their head, I could only stare slack-jawed at the sight of Peter Van Houten. After a moment, he whispered, "We gotta fake pray," and bowed his head. I tried to forget about him and just pray for Augustus. I made a point of listening to the minister and not looking back. The minister called up Isaac, who was much more serious than he'd been at the prefuneral. "Augustus Waters was the Mayor of the Secret City of Cancervania, and he is not replaceable," Isaac began. "Other people will be able to tell you funny stories about Gus, because he was a funny guy, but let me tell you a serious one: A day after I got my eye cut out, Gus showed up at the hospital. I was blind and heartbroken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, 'I have wonderful news!' And I was like, 'I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now,' and Gus said, 'This is wonderful news you want to hear,' and I asked him, 'Fine, what is it?' and he said, 'You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!'"

Isaac couldn't go on, or maybe that was all he had written. After a high school friend told some stories about Gus's considerable basketball talents and his many qualities as a teammate, the minister said, "We'll now hear a few words from Augustus's friend, Hazel."

Then I began reading from the eulogy I'd written. "There's a great quote in Gus's house, one that both he and I found very comforting: Without pain, we couldn't know joy." I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

When Mom and Dad and I got in the car, I said, "I don't want to go. I'm tired."

"Hazel," Mom said.

"Mom, there won't be a place to sit and it'll last forever and I'm exhausted."

"Hazel, we have to go for Mr. and Mrs. Waters," Mom said.

"Just . . ." I said. I felt so little in the backseat for some reason. I kind of wanted to be little. I wanted to be like six years old or

something. "Fine," I said.

I just stared out the window awhile. I really didn't want to go. I didn't want to see them lower the empty casket into the ground in the spot he'd picked out with his dad, and I didn't want to see his parents sink to their knees in the dew-wet grass and moan in pain, and I didn't want to see Peter Van Houten's alcoholic belly stretched against his linen jacket, and I didn't want to cry in front of a bunch of people, and I didn't want to toss a handful of dirt onto his grave, and I didn't want my parents to have to stand there beneath the clear blue sky with its certain slant of afternoon light, thinking about their day and their kid and my plot and my casket and my dirt. But I did these things. I did all of them and worse, because Mom and Dad felt we should.

After it was over, Van Houten walked up to me and put a fat hand on my shoulder and said, "Could I hitch a ride? Left my rental at the bottom of the hill." I shrugged, and he opened the door to the backseat right as my dad unlocked the car. Inside, he leaned between the front seats and said, "Peter Van Houten: Novelist Emeritus and Semiprofessional Disappointer." My parents introduced themselves. He shook their hands. I was pretty surprised that Peter Van Houten had flown halfway across the world to attend a funeral. "How did you even—" I started, but he cut me off.

Okay, yeah," I said. I was in no mood for this. Peter Van Houten would not hijack Gus's funeral. I wouldn't allow it. "Thanks," I said. "Well, I guess we're at the bottom of the hill."

"You don't want an explanation?" he asked.

"No," I said. "I'm good. I think you're a pathetic alcoholic who says fancy things to get attention like a really precocious eleven-year-old and I feel super bad for you. But yeah, no, you're not the guy who wrote An Imperial Affliction anymore, so you couldn't sequel it even if you wanted to. Thanks, though. Have an excellent life."

"But—"

"Thanks for the booze," I said. "Now get out of the car." He looked scolded. Dad had stopped the car and we just idled there below Gus's grave for a minute until Van Houten opened the door and, finally silent, left.

As we drove away, I watched through the back window as he took a drink and raised the bottle in my direction, as if toasting me. I felt kinda bad for him, to be honest.

We finally got home around six, and I was exhausted. I just wanted to sleep, but Mom made me eat some cheesy pasta.

**CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE**

At Isaac's house

"Did he ever give you that thing he was writing?"

"What thing?"

"That sequel or whatever to that book you liked."

I turned to Isaac. "What?"

"He said he was working on something for you but he wasn't that good of a writer."

"When did he say this?"

"I don't know. Like, after he got back from Amsterdam at some point."

"At which point?" I pressed. Had he not had a chance to finish it? Had he finished it and left it on his computer or something?

"Um," Isaac sighed. "Um, I don't know. We talked about it over here once. He was over here, like—uh, we played with my email machine and I'd just gotten an email from my grandmother. I can check on the machine if you—"

"Yeah, yeah, where is it?"

He'd mentioned it a month before. A month. Not a good month, admittedly, but still—a month. That was enough time for him to have written something, at least. There was still something of him, or by him at least, floating around out there. I needed it.

"I'm gonna go to his house," I told Isaac.

It was a hot afternoon in Indianapolis, the air thick and still like we were inside a cloud. It was the worst kind of air for me, and I told myself it was just the air when the walk from his driveway to his front door felt infinite. I rang the doorbell, and Gus's mom answered.

"Isaac told me Gus was writing something, something for me," I said.

"We can check his computer," his mom said.

"We're not ready," his dad said. "But of course, yes, Hazel. Of course you can."

I didn't find anything.

"Is there anywhere he might have put a notebook? Like by his hospital bed or something?" It wasn't reasonable since the police would have found it when they where searching for him but still.

"Hazel," his dad said, "you were there every day with us. You— he wasn't alone much, sweetie. He wouldn't have had time to write anything. I know you want . . . I want that, too. But the messages he leaves for us now are coming from above, Hazel." He pointed toward the ceiling, as if Gus were hovering just above the house. Maybe he was. I don't know. I didn't feel his presence, though.

"Yeah," I said. I promised to visit them again in a few days.

**CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR**

**(Nothing here because it wasn't really needed for the Fanfiction to make sense)**

**CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE**

**I **woke up the next morning panicked because I'd dreamed of being alone and boatless in a huge lake. I bolted up, straining against the BiPAP, and felt Mom's arm on me. "Hi, you okay?"

My heart raced, but I nodded. Mom said, "Kaitlyn's on the phone for you." I pointed at my BiPAP. She helped me get it off and hooked me up to Philip and then finally I took my cell from Mom and said, "Hey, Kaitlyn."

"Just calling to check in," she said. "See how you're doing."

"Yeah, thanks," I said. "I'm doing okay."

"You've just had the worst luck, darling. It's unconscionable."

"I guess," I said. I didn't think much about my luck anymore one way or the other. Honestly, I didn't really want to talk with Kaitlyn about anything, but she kept dragging the conversation along.

"Oh. It was . . . it was nice to spend time with someone so interesting. We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?"

"Alas, I do not. The boys I'm acquainted with are vastly uninteresting."

"He wasn't perfect or anything. He wasn't your fairy-tale Prince Charming or whatever. But I liked him best that way."

"Do you have like a scrapbook of pictures and letters he wrote?"

"I have some pictures, but he never really wrote me letters. Except, well there are some missing pages from his notebook that might have been something for me, but I guess he threw them away or they got lost or something."

"Maybe he mailed them to you," she said.

"Nah, they'd've gotten here."

"Then maybe they weren't written for you," she said. "Maybe . . . I mean, not to depress you or anything, but maybe he wrote them for someone else and mailed them—"

"VAN HOUTEN!" I shouted.

"Are you okay? Was that a cough?"

"Kaitlyn, I love you. You are a genius. I have to go."

I hung up, rolled over, reached for my laptop, turned it on, and emailed .

Lidewij,

I believe Augustus Waters sent a few pages from a notebook to Peter Van Houten shortly before he (Augustus) died. It is very important to me that someone reads these pages. I want to read them, of course, but maybe they weren't written for me. Regardless, they must be read. They must be. Can you help?

Your friend, Hazel Lancaster

I wondered why he'd written Van Houten in those last days instead of me, telling Van Houten that he'd be redeemed if only he gave me my sequel. Maybe the notebook pages had just repeated his request to Van Houten. It made sense, Gus leveraging his terminality to make my dream come true: The sequel was a tiny thing to die for, but it was the biggest thing left at his disposal.

Lidewij finally wrote back just after six P.M. while I was on the couch watching both TV and videos on my laptop. I saw immediately there were four attachments to the email and I wanted to open them first, but I resisted temptation and read the email.

Dear Hazel,

Peter is still in America, I'm ashamed to say I didn't resign the day I said I would. There was a large pile of mail on his dining room table, where I found the letter very quickly, it was already opened, I knew this, I know a lot of things that I can't tell you, it's not up to me, I apologize in advance for when you find out what I'm talking about and believe me I wanted them to tell you but I didn't feel like I had the right, they didn't want me to. I have attached the pages from his letter here.

May God bless and keep you, Hazel.

Your friend,

Lidewij Vliegenthart

I clicked open the four attachments. His handwriting was messy, slanting across the page, the size of the letters varying, the color of the pen changing. He'd written it over many days in varying degrees of consciousness.

Van Houten, I'm a good person but a shitty writer. You're a shitty person but a good writer. We'd make a good team. I don't want to ask you any favors, but if you have time—and from what I saw, you have plenty—I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I've got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here's the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death.

But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.

(Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.)

We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can't stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it's silly and useless—especially useless in my current state—but I am an animal like any other.

Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either.

People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.

After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die before I could tell her that I was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time. I got my wish, I suppose.

A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren't allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, "She's still taking on water." A desert blessing, an ocean curse.

What else? You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

I do, Augustus.

I do.

**CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX**

I don't even know where to start; I was going to Isaac's house to show him the letter, I hurried out to the minivan and hauled the oxygen cart up and into the passenger seat. I started the car. A hip-hop beat blared from the stereo, and as I reached to change the radio station, someone started rapping. In Swedish. I swiveled around and screamed when I saw Peter Van Houten sitting in the backseat.

"I apologize for alarming you," Peter Van Houten said over the rapping. He was still wearing the funeral suit, several days later. He smelled like he was sweating alcohol. "You're welcome to keep the CD," he said. "It's Snook, one of the major Swedish—"

"Ah ah ah ah GET OUT OF MY CAR." I turned off the stereo.

"It's your mother's car, as I understand it," he said. "Also, it wasn't locked."

"Oh, my God! Get out of the car or I'll call nine-one-one. Dude, what is your problem ?"

"If only there were just one," he mused. "I am here simply to apologize. You were correct in noting earlier that I am a pathetic little man. At least I was.''

"Okay," I said. It would have been a more moving speech had he not slurred his words.

"You remind me of Anna."

"I remind a lot of people of a lot of people," I answered. "I really have to go."

"So drive," he said.

"Get out."

"No. You remind me of Anna," he said again. After a second, I put the car in reverse and backed out. I couldn't make him leave, and I didn't have to. I'd drive to Gus's house, and Gus's parents would make him leave.

"You are, of course, familiar," Van Houten said, "with Antonietta Meo."

"Yeah, no," I said. I turned on the stereo, and the Swedish hip-hop blared, but Van Houten yelled over it.

"She may soon be the youngest nonmartyr saint ever beatified by the Catholic Church. She had the same cancer that Mr. Waters had, osteosarcoma. They removed her right leg. The pain was excruciating. As Antonietta Meo lay dying at the ripened age of six from this agonizing cancer, she told her father, 'Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it's worth.' Is that true, Hazel?"

I wasn't looking at him directly but at his reflection in the mirror. "No," I shouted over the music. "That's bullshit."

"But don't you wish it were true!" he cried back. I cut the music. "I'm sorry I ruined your trip. You were too young. You were—" He broke down. As if he had a right to cry over Gus. Van Houten was just another of the endless mourners who did not know him, another too-late lamentation on his wall.

"You didn't ruin our trip, you self-important bastard. We had an awesome trip."

"I am trying," he said. "I am trying, I swear." It was around then that I realized Peter Van Houten had a dead person in his family. I considered the honesty with which he had written about cancer kids; the fact that he couldn't speak to me in Amsterdam except to ask if I'd dressed like her on purpose; his shittiness around me and Augustus; his aching question about the relationship between pain's extremity and its value. He sat back there drinking, an old man who'd been drunk for years. I thought of a statistic I wish I didn't know: Half of marriages end in the year after a child's death. I looked back at Van Houten. I was driving down College and I pulled over behind a line of parked cars and asked, "You had a kid who died?"

"My daughter," he said. "She was eight. Suffered beautifully. Will never be beatified."

"She had leukemia?" I asked. He nodded. "Like Anna," I said.

"Very much like her, yes."

"You were married?"

"No. Well, not at the time of her death. I was insufferable long before we lost her. Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you."

"Did you live with her?"

"No, not primarily, although at the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them."

After a second, I said, "So it's like you gave her this second life where she got to be a teenager."

"I suppose that would be a fair assessment," he said, and then quickly added, "I assume you are familiar with Philippa Foot's Trolley Problem thought experiment?"

"And then I show up at your house and I'm dressed like the girl you hoped she would live to become and you're, like, all taken aback by it."

"There's a trolley running out of control down a track," he said.

"I don't care about your stupid thought experiment," I said.

"It's Philippa Foot's, actually."

"Well, hers either," I said.

"She didn't understand why it was happening," he said. "I had to tell her she would die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said that I would not, not yet. But eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. And I told her that in the meantime we had great family up there that would take care of her. And she asked me when I would be there, and I told her soon. Twenty-two years ago."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I."

After a while, I asked, "What happened to her mom?"

He smiled. "You're still looking for your sequel, you little rat."

I smiled back. "You should go home," I told him. "Sober up. Write another novel. Do the thing you're good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something."

He stared at me through the mirror for a long time. "Okay," he said. "Yeah. You're right. But I'm not sure I want to stop drinking, I'm not sure I need to, I can't write anymore, I suppose, but do you have any news of where Augustus went when he was dying?''

''I try not to think of it, this last year has been hell facing his death, uselessly wondering about the specifics of it won't help, maybe he took his own life, maybe he didn't want his parents or me to see his lifeless body.'' I said. I was getting really tired of Van Houten, I just wanted him to get out of the car, but I kept talking just in case this sad old man ended up knowing something.

''The day Augustus was dying I took him somewhere with me.'' He stopped, probably because he expected me to interrupt him, and I was about to, but I just stared at him, the sooner he was over with his bullshit the sooner he would leave me alone.

''His first letter, the one about writing you an eulogy, it made me think of how shitty I had been to you two and how much you reminded me of my daughter, I can't do anything for her, but I could do something for you, hoping of course that you wouldn't die before getting your wish, I couldn't take you, I didn't dare, first you were not going to accept, and then while you are dying, you are probably not dying this month or so, Augustus was already lost, he had nothing to lose, I answered his letter, but not about the eulogy, I told him I was going to cure his cancer, he wasn't stupid, he wasn't delusional, he is a smart boy, he knows, he knew I was really smart too.'' I started to feel like puking, Van Houten couldn't be serious, I knew what he was trying to tell me, what he was explaining to me, and it couldn't be true, I remained silent anyway, I guess what they say about humans keeping hope under the most impossible and ridicule circumstances is true, also because I was going to gauge his eyes out, not IF but WHEN it became obvious he was lying.

''I could keep talking about this for hours, but the sooner you know the better, now, taking someone out of a hospital is pretty easy, is not like he was at a jail. We already had everything figured out, I took him to a house I own, I own a lot of houses, anyway, I'm rich.'' I rolled my eyes and he kept talking.

''Sure, the police was looking for him but they have no reason for knocking precisely on that house's door and is not like Augustus was in any condition to play in the yard. The reason he was dying so fast is of course the wrong treatment he was receiving, he got lucky to get in that experiment at all, that's what they told him, sure, but it was wrong for him, I already had some advance on the cure I was making, I would abandon it and came back to it ever since my daughter died, when I was really bitter and angry I would stop for years, then if I was suddenly feeling positive I would start again. So I started him on this standard cancer drug that wasn't a cure, and not my invention and he got stable.'' I was just looking at him shocked; I wanted to believe what he was saying.

''Now, he didn't want to tell anyone about it for fear that it wouldn't work, my cure, that's it, what use was him getting stable if he was already so full of cancer, so terminal? He didn't want to get anyone's hopes up, he knew it's not like you would think he was kidnapped or still alive and suffering somewhere else, that after a while, worst case scenario everyone would think he was dead just like you were supposing he was going to the day he disappeared. So we waited, the day I went to his funeral I didn't tell you about it because we weren't sure he was completely free of cancer yet, but now we are, I told him it was better if I told you instead of you suddenly seeing his ghost, he agreed.''

It was a lot to take in, but I was expecting him to say exactly something along that for a while now, so I just kept talking about it as if I believed him, which I did, I mean, it was very likely that someone was going to find cancer's cure sooner or later. Why not today? I've already had my share of suffering anyway.

''Is he here? Is he alive? You are telling me he is alive.'' I was surprised at how anxious my voice had sounded, but not really.

''Well yes, but if I had told you that since you got in the car you would have hit me, you wouldn't even allow me to talk as it was.'' He said.

''I knew there was a reason you were so important to me at a time, never would have pictured this.''

''Let's go see him.''

So yeah, Augustus looked pretty much as he did when I first met him, I cried and whatever, I'm not dying anymore, no one is dying of cancer anymore, well, yes, there's a 96% cure rate or so. Cancer is still killing people, but in the same way that pneumonia and other sickness do, I mean cancer is not what it used to. This is what Lidewij was asking me to forgive her about, she knew, but of course that I understood, it was not her secret to tell.

The hardest part of course was telling his parents, it's never easy being told that your dead loved one is actually alive, it's always the happiest thing that could happen to anyone. Van Houten is not an alcoholic anymore, he still loves the booze a bit too much. But he cured cancer; he is as close to perfect, he is still a douche. He is living in America with Lidewij, he refuses to keep writing whenever I tell him he should start again, I don't bother him too much about it, I mean he cured cancer.

Isaac talks to Monica again, sometimes, they fight too often, she is such a bitch, and for that matter, she did told him the reason she dumped him was that he was too much of a hassle what with being blind and always with his cancer surprises and whatever. Luckily he is not interested in her like that anymore but I really hate when we have to bring her with us when we just want to have fun.

One shitty thing about not dying anymore is that my parents became way less permissive, so they did become used to beauty. But I'm not going to complain about it after all I've lived, I'm so happy. The world is a wish-granting factory.

We were at my house watching TV.

''So did you get bored with Van Houten for a whole year?'' I asked.

''Not really, he was fun, he is such a douche.'' Augustus said.

''Yeah, I guess so. And he cured Cancer''

"I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you."

"Augustus," I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weird joy, but I couldn't say it back. I couldn't say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded.

"Augustus Waters," I said, looking up at him, thinking that you can't ''not kiss'' someone you like back after their love confession.

And then we were kissing. As his parted lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated, and then it all made sense, this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.

The kiss lasted forever. Well, not Forever capital F, but some infinities are bigger than other infinities.


End file.
